How to put your money where your strategy is

M A R C H 2 012
s t r a t e g y
p r a c t i c e
How to put your
money where your
strategy is
Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo, and Reinier Musters
Most companies allocate the same resources
to the same business units year after
year. That makes it difficult to realize strategic
goals and undermines performance.
Here’s how to overcome inertia.
Picture two global companies, each operating a range of
different businesses. Company A allocates capital, talent, and research
dollars consistently every year, making small changes but always
following the same broad investment pattern. Company B continually
evaluates the performance of business units, acquires and divests
assets, and adjusts resource allocations based on each division’s relative
market opportunities. Over time, which company will be worth more?
If you guessed company B, you’re right. In fact, our research suggests
that after 15 years, it will be worth an average of 40 percent more than
company A. We also found, though, that the vast majority of companies
resemble company A. Therein lies a major disconnect between the
aspirations of many corporate strategists to boldly jettison unattractive
businesses or double down on exciting new opportunities, and the
reality of how they invest capital, talent, and other scarce resources.
For the past two years, we’ve been systematically looking at corporate
resource allocation patterns, their relationship to performance, and the
implications for strategy. We found that while inertia reigns at most
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companies, in those where capital and other resources flow more readily
from one business opportunity to another, returns to shareholders
are higher and the risk of falling into bankruptcy or the hands of an
acquirer lower.
We’ve also reviewed the causes of inertia (such as cognitive biases and
politics) and identified a number of steps companies can take to
overcome them. These include introducing new decision rules and
processes to ensure that the allocation of resources is a top-of-mind
issue for executives, and remaking the corporate center so it can provide
more independent counsel to the CEO and other key decision makers.
We’re not suggesting that executives act as investment portfolio
managers. That implies a search for stand-alone returns at any cost
rather than purposeful decisions that enhance a corporation’s longterm value and strategic coherence. But given the prevalence of stasis
today, most organizations are a long way from the head-long pursuit
of disconnected opportunities. Rather, many leaders face a stark choice:
shift resources among their businesses to realize strategic goals or
run the risk that the market will do it for them. Which would you prefer?
Weighing the evidence
Every year for the past quarter century, US capital markets have issued
about $85 billion of equity and $536 billion in associated corporate
debt. During the same period, the amount of capital allocated or reallocated within multibusiness companies was approximately $640 billion
annually—more than equity and corporate debt combined.1 While most
perceive markets as the primary means of directing capital and
recycling assets across industries, companies with multiple businesses
actually play a bigger role in allocating capital and other resources
across a spectrum of economic opportunities.
To understand how effectively corporations are moving their resources,
we reviewed the performance of more than 1,600 US companies
between 1990 and 2005.2 The results were striking. For one-third of the
1See Ilan Guedj, Jennifer Huang, and Johan Sulaeman, “Internal capital allocation and firm
performance,” working paper for the International Symposium on Risk Management and
Derivatives, October 2009 (revised in March 2010).
2We used Compustat data on 1,616 US-listed companies with operations in a minimum of two
distinct four-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Resource allocation
is measured as 1 minus the minimum percentage of capital expenditure received by distinct
business units over the 15-year period. This measure captures the relative amount of capital
that can flow across a business over time; the rest of the money is “stuck.” Similar results were
found with more sophisticated measures that control for sales and asset growth.
3 2012
Q2
Resource allocation
Exhibit 1 of 3
Exhibit 1
Capital allocations were essentially fixed for roughly one-third
of the business units in our sample.
Correlation index of business units’ capital expenditures,
year-over-year change,1990–2005
Companies’ degree of
capital reallocation
1.0
Low
0.9
Medium
0.8
High
0.7
The closer the correlation
index is to 1.0, the less the
year-over-year change in a
company’s capital allocation
across business units.
0.6
0.5
0
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
businesses in our sample, the amount of capital received in a given year
was almost exactly that received the year before—the mean correlation was 0.99. For the economy as a whole, the mean correlation across
all industries was 0.92 (Exhibit 1).
In other words, the enormous amount of strategic planning in corporations seems to result, on the whole, in only modest resource shifts.
Whether the relevant resource is capital expenditures, operating
expenditures, or human capital, this finding is consistent across industries as diverse as mining and consumer packaged goods. Given
the performance edge associated with higher levels of reallocation, such
static behavior is almost certainly not sensible. Our research showed
the following:
• C ompanies that reallocated more resources—the top third of our
sample, shifting an average of 56 percent of capital across business
units over the entire 15-year period—earned, on average, 30 percent
higher total returns to shareholders (TRS) annually than companies in the bottom third of the sample. This result was surprisingly
consistent across all sectors of the economy. It seems that when
companies disproportionately invest in value-creating businesses,
they generate a mutually reinforcing cycle of growth and further
investment options (Exhibit 2).
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• Consistent and incremental reallocation levels diminished the
variance of returns over the long term.
• A company in the top third of reallocators was, on average,
13 percent more likely to avoid acquisition or bankruptcy than low
reallocators.
• O ver an average six-year tenure, chief executives who reallocated
less than their peers did in the first three years on the job were
significantly more likely than their more active peers to be removed
in years four through six. To paraphrase the philosopher Thomas
Hobbes, tenure for static CEOs is likely to be nasty, brutish, and,
above all, short.
We should note the importance of a long-term view: over time spans
of less than three years, companies that reallocated higher levels
of resources delivered lower shareholder returns than their more stable
peers did. One explanation for this pattern could be risk aversion on
the part of investors, who are initially cautious about major corporate
capital shifts and then recognize value only once the results become
visible. Another factor could be the deep interconnection of resource
allocation choices with corporate strategy. The goal isn’t to make
dramatic changes every year but to reallocate resources consistently
over the medium to long term in service of a clear corporate strategy.
That provides the time necessary for new investments to flourish, for
established businesses to maximize their potential, and for capital
from declining investments to be redeployed effectively. Given the rich-
Q2 2012
ness
and complexity of the issues at play here, differences in the
Resource between
allocation
relationship
short- and long-term resource shifts and finanExhibit
2 of 3 is likely to be a fruitful area for further research.
cial
performance
Exhibit 2
Companies with higher levels of capital reallocation
experienced higher average shareholder returns.
Companies’ degree of
capital reallocation
(n = 1,616 companies)
Total returns to shareholders,
compound annual growth rate,
1990–2005, %
10.2
High
Medium
Low
8.9
7.8
5
Why companies get stuck
Why do so many companies undermine their strategic direction by
allocating the same levels of resources to business units year after year?
The reasons vary widely, from the very bad—companies operating on
autopilot—to the more sensible. After all, sometimes it’s wise to persist
with previously chosen resource allocations, especially if there are no
viable reallocation opportunities or if switching costs are too high. And
companies in capital-intensive sectors, for example, often have
to commit resources more than five years ahead of time to long-term
programs, leaving less discretionary capital to play with.
For the most part, however, the failure to pursue a more active allocation
agenda is a result of organizational inertia that has multiple causes. We’ll
focus here on cognitive biases and corporate politics, but regardless of
source, inertia’s gravitational pull is strong—and overcoming it is critical
to creating an effective corporate strategy. As author and Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers partner Randy Komisar told us, “If corporations don’t
approach rebalancing as fiduciaries for long-term corporate value,
their life span will decline as creative destruction gets the better of them.”
Cognitive biases
Biases such as anchoring and loss aversion, which are deeply rooted in the
workings of the human brain and have been much studied by behavioral
economists, are major contributors to the inertia that prevents more active
reallocation.3 Anchoring refers to the tendency to use any number, even
an irrelevant one, as an anchor for future choices. Judges asked to roll a
pair of dice before making a simulated sentencing decision, for example,
are influenced by the result of that roll, even though they deny they are.
Within a company, last year’s budget allocation often serves as a ready,
salient, and justifiable anchor during the planning process. We know
this to be true in practice, and it’s been reinforced for us recently as we’ve
played a business game with several groups of senior executives. The
game asked participants to allocate a capital budget across a fictitious
company’s businesses and provided players with identical growth
and return projections for the relevant markets. Half of the group also
received details of the previous year’s capital allocation. Those without
last year’s capital budget all allocated resources in a range that optimized
for the expected outlook in market growth and returns. The other
half aligned capital far more closely with last year’s pattern, which had
little to do with the potential for future returns. And this was a
game where the company was fictitious and no one’s career was at risk!
3See Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, “The case for behavioral strategy,” mckinseyquarterly.com,
March 2010.
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In reality, anchoring is reinforced by loss aversion: losses typically hurt
us at least twice as much as equivalent gains give us pleasure. That
reduces the appetite for taking risks and makes it painful for managers
to give up resources.
Corporate politics
A second major source of inertia is political. There’s often a tight alignment between the interests of senior executives and those of their
divisions or business units, whose ability to attract capital can significantly influence the personal credibility of a leader. Indeed, because
executives are competing for resources, anyone who wins less than he
or she did last year is invariably seen as weak. At the extreme, leaders
of business units and divisions see themselves as playing for their own
“teams” rather than for the corporation as a whole, making it challenging to reallocate resources significantly. Even if a reduction in resources
to their division benefits the company as a whole, ambitious leaders
are unlikely to agree without a fight. As one CEO told us: “If you’re asking
Q2 2012
me to play Robin Hood, that’s not going to work.”
Resource allocation
Exhibit 3 of 3
Exhibit 3
Inertia may affect the distribution of other scarce resources,
such as advertising spending.
Correlation between each brand’s 2010 advertising budget and its average advertising
budget for previous 5 years at one consumer goods company (n = 40 brands)
Average advertising spending by brand
over 5 years, 2004–09, % of corporate total
5.0
r 2 = 0.87
4.5
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0
0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
6.0
6.5
7.0
7.5
8.0
Average advertising spending by brand in 2010, % of corporate total
r2 is the measure of interdependence of 2 or more variables.
8.5
9.0
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Overcoming inertia
Tempting as it is to believe that one’s own company avoids these traps,
our research suggests that’s unlikely. Our experience also suggests, though,
that taking steps such as those described below can materially improve
a company’s resource allocation and its connection to strategic priorities.
These imperatives apply not just to capital but also to other scarce
resources, such as talent, R&D dollars, and marketing expenditures (as
shown in Exhibit 3, for advertising spending by one consumer goods
company). All of these also are subject to the forces of inertia, which can
undermine an organization’s ability to achieve its strategic goals.
Consider one company we know that prioritized expanding in China. It
set an ambitious sales growth target for the country and planned to
meet it by supplementing organic growth with a series of acquisitions. Yet
it identified just three people to spearhead this strategic imperative—
a small fraction of the number required, which is typical of the problems
that arise when the link between corporate strategy and resource
allocation is weak. Here are four ideas for doing better.
1. Have a target corporate portfolio.
There’s a quote attributed to author Lewis Carroll: “If you don’t know
where you are going, any road will take you there.” When it comes to
developing an allocation agenda, it’s helpful to have a target portfolio in
mind. Most companies resist this, for understandable reasons: it requires
a lot of conviction to describe planned portfolio changes in anything
but the vaguest terms, and the right answers may change if the broader
business environment turns out to be different from the expected one.
In our experience, though, a target portfolio need not be slavish or
mechanistic and can be a powerful forcing device to move beyond generic
strategy statements, such as “strengthen in Asian markets” or “continue
to migrate from products to services.” Identifying business opportunities
where your company wants to increase its exposure can create
a foundation for scrutinizing how it allocates capital, talent, and
other resources.
Setting targets is just a starting point; companies also need mechanisms
for revisiting and adjusting them over time. For example, Google holds
a quarterly review process that examines the performance of all core
product and engineering areas against three measures: what each area did
in the previous 90 days and forecasts for the next 90 days, its mediumterm financial trajectory, and its strategic positioning. And the company
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has ensured that it can allocate resources in an agile way by not
having business units, which diminishes the impact of corporate politics.4
Evaluating reallocation performance relative to peers also can help companies set targets. From 1990 to 2009, for example, Honeywell
reallocated about 25 percent of its capital as it shifted away from some
existing business areas toward aerospace, air conditioning, and controls
(for more on Honeywell’s approach to resource allocation, see our
interview with Andreas C. Kramvis, president and CEO of Honeywell
Performance Materials and Technologies, in “Breaking strategic
inertia: Tips from two leaders,” on mckinseyquarterly.com). Honeywell’s
competitor Danaher, which was in similar businesses in 1990,
moved 66 percent of its capital into new ones during the same period.
Both companies achieved returns above the industry average in these
years—TRS for Honeywell was 14 percent and for Danaher 25 percent.
We’re not suggesting that companies adopt a mind-set of “more is
better, and if my competitor is making big moves, I should too.” But
differences in allocation levels among peer companies can serve
as valuable clues about contrasting business approaches—clues that
prompt questions yielding strategic insights.
2. Use all available resource reallocation tools.
Talking about resource allocation in broad terms oversimplifies the
choices facing senior executives. In reality, allocation comprises
four fundamental activities: seeding, nurturing, pruning, and harvesting.
Seeding is entering new business areas, whether through an acquisition or an organic start-up investment. Nurturing involves building up
an existing business through follow-on investments, including bolt-on
acquisitions. Pruning takes resources away from an existing business,
either by giving some of its annual capital allocation to others or by
putting a portion of the business up for sale. Finally, harvesting is selling
whole businesses that no longer fit a company’s portfolio or undertaking equity spin-offs.
Our research found that there’s little overall difference between the
seeding and harvesting behavior of low and high reallocators. This should
come as little surprise: seeding involves giving money to new business
opportunities—something that’s rarely resisted. And while harvesting
is difficult, it most often occurs as a result of a business unit’s sustained underperformance, which is difficult to ignore.
4For more, see James Manyika, “Google’s CFO on growth, capital structure, and leadership,”
mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2011.
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However, we found a 170 percent difference in activity levels between
high and low reallocators when it came to the combination of nurturing
and pruning existing businesses. Together, these two represent half of
all corporate reallocation activity. Both are difficult because they often
involve taking resources from one business unit and giving them to
another. What’s more, the better a company is at encouraging seeding,
the more important nurturing and pruning become—nurturing to
ensure the success of new initiatives and pruning to eliminate flowers
that won’t ever bloom.
Consider, for example, the efforts of Google CEO Larry Page, over the
past 12 months, to cope with the flowering of ideas brought forth by
the company’s well-known “20 percent rule,” which allows engineers
to spend at least one-fifth of their time on personal projects and has
resulted in products such as AdSense, Gmail, and Google News. These
successes notwithstanding, the 20 percent rule also has yielded many
peripheral projects, which Page has recently been pruning.5
3. Adopt simple rules to break the status quo.
Simple decision rules can help minimize political infighting because
they change the burden of proof from the typical default allocation
(“what we did last year”) to one that makes it impossible to maintain the
status quo. For example, a simple harvesting rule might involve putting a certain percentage of an organization’s portfolio up for sale each
year to maintain vibrancy and to cull dead wood.
When Lee Raymond was CEO of Exxon Mobil, he required the
corporate-planning team to identify 3 to 5 percent of the company’s
assets for potential disposal every year. Exxon Mobil’s divisions
were allowed to retain assets placed in this group only if they could
demonstrate a tangible and compelling turnaround program. In
essence, the burden on the business units was to prove that an asset
should be retained, rather than the other way around. The net effect
was accelerated portfolio upgrading and healthy turnover in the face
of executives’ natural desire to hang on to underperforming assets.
Another approach we’ve observed involves placing existing businesses
into different categories—such as “grow,” “maintain,” and “dispose”—
and then following clearly differentiated resource-investment rules for
each. The purpose of having clear investment rules for each category
of business is to remove as much politics as possible from the resource
allocation process.
5See Claire Cain Miller, “In a quest for focus, Google purges small projects,” nytimes.com,
November 10, 2011.
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Sometimes, the CEO may want a way to shift resources directly, in
parallel with regular corporate processes. One natural-resources
company, for example, gave its CEO sole discretion to allocate 5 percent
of the company’s capital outside of the traditional bottom-up annual
capital allocation process. This provided an opportunity to move the
organization more quickly toward what the CEO believed were
exciting growth opportunities, without first having to go through a
“pruning” fight with the company’s executive-leadership committee.
Of course, the CEO and other senior leaders will need to reinforce
discipline around such simple allocation rules; it’s not easy to hold the
line in the face of special pleading from less-favored businesses.
Developing that level of clarity—not to mention the courage to fight
tough battles that arise as a result—often requires support in the
form of a strong corporate center or a strategic-planning group that’s
independent of competing business interests and can provide objective information (for more on the importance of the corporate center
to resource reallocation, see “The power of an independent corporate
center,” on mckinseyquarterly.com).
4. Implement processes to mitigate inertia.
Systematic processes can strengthen allocation activities. One approach,
explored in detail by our colleagues Sven Smit and Patrick Viguerie, is
to create planning and management processes that generate a granular
view of product and market opportunities.6 The overwhelming tendency is for corporate leaders to allocate resources at a level that is too
high—namely, by division or business unit. When senior management
doesn’t have a granular view, division leaders can use their information
advantage to average out allocations within their domains.
Another approach is to revisit a company’s businesses periodically and
engage in a process similar to the due diligence conducted for investments. Executives at one energy conglomerate annually ask whether
they would choose to invest in a business if they didn’t already own
it. If the answer is no, a discussion about whether and how to exit the
business begins.
Executives can further strengthen allocation decisions by creating
objectivity through re-anchoring—that is, giving the allocation an objective basis that is independent of both the numbers the business units
6See three publications by Mehrdad Baghai, Sven Smit, and S. Patrick Viguerie: “The
granularity of growth,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2007; The Granularity of Growth: How
to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance, Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley, 2008; and “Is your growth strategy flying blind?,” Harvard Business Review, May
2009, Volume 87, Number 5, pp. 86–97.
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provide and the previous year’s allocation. There are numerous ways to
create such independent, fact-based anchors, including deriving
targets from market growth and market share data or leveraging
benchmarking analysis of competitors. The goal is to create an objective way
to ask business leaders this tough question: “If we were to triangulate
between these different approaches, we would expect your investments
and returns to lie within the following range. Why are your estimates
so much higher (or lower)?”
Finally, it’s worth noting that technology is enabling strategy process
innovations that stir the pot through internal discussions and
“crowdsourcing.” For example, Rite-Solutions, a Rhode Island–based
company that builds advanced software for the US Navy, defense
contractors, and first responders, derives 20 percent of its revenue from
businesses identified through a “stock exchange” where employees
can propose and invest in new ideas (for more on this, see “The social
side of strategy,” on mckinseyquarterly.com).
Much of our advice for overcoming inertia within multibusiness
companies assumes that a corporation’s interests are not the same as
the cumulative resource demands of the underlying divisions and
businesses. As they say, turkeys do not vote for Christmas. Putting in
place some combination of the targets, rules, and processes proposed
here may require rethinking the role and inner workings of a company’s
strategic- and financial-planning teams. Although we recognize that
this is not a trivial endeavor, the rewards make the effort worthwhile. A
primary performance imperative for corporate-level executives should
be to escape the tyranny of inertia and create more dynamic portfolios.
The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Michael
Birshan, Marja Engel, Mladen Fruk, John Horn, Conor Kehoe, Devesh
Mittal, Olivier Sibony, and Sven Smit to this article.
Stephen Hall is a director in McKinsey’s London office, and Reinier
Musters is an associate principal in the Amsterdam office. Dan Lovallo is
a professor at the University of Sydney Business School, a senior research
fellow at the Institute for Business Innovation at the University of California,
Berkeley, and an adviser to McKinsey.